Digital Transformation in Food Industry.

Due to rapidly increasing competition in the market, our client, Bigfood Group, saw an urgent need to optimize internal business processes and improve overall efficiency across the whole organization. One of the pillar stones in achieving this goal was to take the company through a course of massive digital transformation.

To support the ongoing development of a wide range of products, the client required a strictly formalized approach to reduce operational costs when creating new products and discontinuing the production of existing ones.

Regularly, every product goes through a lengthy and complex internal workflow while being reviewed by multiple departments before finally reaching one of the production plants. Each department has a specific role to play within a new-product creation process and has to work on specific steps in a particular order. Progress was tracked through dozens of emails and spreadsheets, which caused delays in creating new products and inefficiency in controlling the processes.

On the other end, when a decision to discontinue a product is made, it requires several departments’ involvement to stop production, packaging, warehousing, marketing, and so on, almost simultaneously.

So the client’s primary objective was to reorganize their processes to be more streamlined and automated, so that the business’s most vital activities would be less prone to human error.

When our team took over the project, it became evident that the core challenge was to build the process itself before it was even possible to start automating. The existing workflows were not documented enough, so they were hard to understand from the beginning.

While conducting a set of interview sessions, our team identified some significant issues in the distribution of responsibilities between multiple departments, which could have led to unnecessary bottlenecks. For example, in some cases a department could have been responsible for activities that had little connection to its area of responsibility, while in other cases multiple departments could execute some tasks in parallel.

• Business processes model: uncovered hidden issues within the distribution of responsibilities and the order of performing operational tasks.

• Solution design: designed an automated solution featuring an already optimized business logic.

• Web application: automated some of the most vital workflows of our client.

• Transition roadmap: internal training and release of every application in an iterative way using the phase-gate technique.

One of the first deliverables in this project came thanks to a thorough analysis of the existing business processes and in-depth interviews with respective department leads. Gaining a deeper understanding of the business context helped us uncover hidden issues within the distribution of responsibilities and the order of performing operational tasks, which allowed us to design an automated solution featuring an already optimized business logic.

Next, our team built a web-based application that automated some of the most vital workflows of our client and enabled automated email notifications, progress tracking, reporting, and other activities for effective decision-making.

Our team also planned for the least painful transition roadmap to the updated workflows, including internal training sessions, and released every application in an iterative way using the phase-gate technique. Each next application was staged for release upon successful adoption of its predecessor.